The desert is a hard and hungry home to which nomads have adapted their nature and their character. Other men do not try to go out into the desert or to live with the nomads…nay, should a nomad see the possibility of exchanging his condition with that of a settled person, he would not fail to do so.
-The Muqaddimah, Ibn Khaldoun (1332-1406)
Maybe KhairAllah would call himself neither nomad nor settled, living as he once did as a camelman and as he does now on a street with sheep and goats behind his door. Would he agree with Ibn Khaldoun that he hadn’t failed to swap one life for another? Perhaps hesitated is the better word, because even though no one moved into the desert as he moved out, Omdurman has never been a place of dreams, especially now in war.